Stamps for Sinners and Other Taxpayers

By ELIZABETH OLSON

Published: February 12, 2005

A slice of 20th-century American history will be auctioned for the first time on Saturday in New York, when the National Postal Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, sells some 35,000 examples of ornate and colorful revenue stamps.

Among the stamps offered for sale are ones once affixed to wine, beer, narcotics and even marijuana as proof that ''sin'' taxes had been paid on those items. The federal government stopped using such stamps decades ago.

The liveliest interest has been in the marijuana stamps, which were used starting in 1937 when the Marihuana Tax Act was passed to control, and, some say, outlaw, the use of cannabis. Only a few such stamps are known to be in private collectors' hands. The stamps, which are yellow, blue, green and red, are being sold singly and in sheets.

But the sale, which is expected to raise $2 million for the Smithsonian's National Philatelic Collection, includes a broad variety of other revenue stamps for silver, snuff, filled cheese and distilled spirits. Also on auction are stamps for transactions of documents and stock transfers.

Often confused with postal stamps, revenue stamps were first issued in the colonial era more than 250 years ago. Their use on a large scale began to finance the Civil War's estimated $3 billion cost. The Union government issued 102 different stamps over the four years of the war to tax almost every commercial document as well as items including matches, medicines, perfumes and even oleomargarine.

Using stamps for some transactions, as well as certain so-called sin items, continued until the 1970's. Starting in 1954, the Internal Revenue Service began donating 1,900 varieties of unused or duplicate stamps to the philatelic collection, which was later housed by the postal museum.

After debating about how to release the stamps but not flood the market, the postal museum, which houses about 7.8 million unused revenue stamps, decided last year to retain about 400,000 examples and auction others.

The decision set off a controversy among stamp collectors and dealers because the museum said it would burn some stamps. Collectors and dealers fought that, and the museum agreed that it would, instead, mark some of the stamps with ink to differentiate them from more valuable mint-condition examples, and sell the marked ones as well.

Among the stamps expected to bring the highest sums at the auction are three rare 1941 series wine stamps, unmarked, each of which is valued at $25,000. There are also three examples of another wine stamp, the 1 7/10 cent stamp, which are each expected to fetch about $10,000, because there is only one recorded example in private hands. These stamps are also unmarked.

Stamps on liquor are often the largest ones because they were attached to wine cases or beer barrels. Narcotics stamps charged one cent an ounce for opium, coca leaves and drugs derived from those substances.

Other items expected to bring high prices are sheets of stock transaction stamps, valued at $40,000 to $50,000 each, and a sheet of 18-cent narcotics stamps, distinctive because of their long, thin shape, which were affixed to bottles of medicines. That sheet is expected to bring $10,000, according to the pre-auction estimate.

Still, the marijuana stamps have elicited the most interest.

''About 50 percent of all the questions we are getting relate to the marijuana stamps,'' said Ted Wilson, registrar of the postal museum.

''These are not collectors, but are people who are just fascinated by them,'' he said.

Marijuana was among the drugs set to be regulated under the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act, but the pharmaceutical industry opposed such regulation, arguing that the substance was not habit-forming. As a result of this pressure, marijuana continued to be sold legally for medicinal and research uses.

After decades of debate over its dangers and how to regulate it uniformly among the states, which treated marijuana with different degrees of strictness, the federal government taxed it starting in 1937, said Richard Friedberg, a revenue stamp dealer in Meadville, Pa., who wrote the foreword to the auction catalog. Doctors and dentists had to pay the tax if they wanted to continue prescribing the substance for patients.

The Marijuana Policy Project, an independent research group, and other researchers say the stamps were not that widely used, and that the effect of the 1937 law was to outlaw marijuana. In 1971, marijuana was included in the Controlled Substances Act as an illegal substance.

Adding to the marijuana stamps' aura, about 37 of them were stolen from the philatelic collection in the 1970's. Three of those were recovered. Of the others, some had serial numbers, but none have ever appeared for sale, Mr. Wilson said.

Proceeds from the auction, to be held at the Four Seasons Hotel by Matthew Bennett International, will be used to buy early United States postal stamps and early Confederate state stamps for the stamp collection, said Wilson Hulme, the postal museum's curator of philately.

Photos: Among revenue stamps being auctioned off today by the National Postal Museum are these for marijuana.; The investment that got away: from pennies in 1941 to $25,000. (Photographs by James W. Prichard for The New York Times)